Head Kicking Quadratic Equations
Ever since I discovered Power Rangers as a child I’ve had a fascination with martial arts. There’s something intrinsically awesome about being able to kick a 6ft space monster in the face while wearing bright red spandex. At least…I think so.
When I got to senior school, one of the first things I did was sign up to all the martial arts classes I could. I settled on Judo as my favourite, largely because I didn’t have the flexibility to head kick anything more than about 2 ½ft tall.
In Judo, as in most martial arts, your level of skill is signified by the colour of your belt, with white belt at the bottom and black belt at the top (actually you can go above black belt but you get the point).
In order to progress to the next belt, you have to show that you’ve mastered all the techniques expected of someone at that level. It’s not enough to say that you’ve kind of mastered them, or that you reckon you could pull it off on a good day. You need to be able to show that you can perform each technique consistently, on demand, with absolute control.
There are two reasons for this. First, many of the techniques at the higher levels build on techniques you’ve already learned . For example, the powerful throw hara-goshi is pretty much just a variant of o-goshi, but if you try to perform hara-goshi before learning o-goshi you’re likely to land on your face.
The second reason, which is probably more important, is that your belt determines the level you compete at in tournaments. If an overly lenient teacher gives you your black belt too early, you’re likely to end your next fight on a stretcher.
Britain’s education system is a lot like the overly lenient teacher, sending pupils into the fray before they’re ready and getting them hurt.
Currently, what you’re taught in school depends almost entirely on your age. Different sets may be taught in different ways, but ultimately, at the end of the year, you all sit the same exams based on the same syllabus.
For the most gifted children this is fine. They ace the exam, get near as damn it 100%, and move on feeling confident and ready for what’s coming next.
Other children have the opposite experience. They fail the exam miserably, get a very low mark, and await next year’s syllabus with a combination of trepidation and despair.
At this point, the martial arts instructor would say, “don’t worry about it mate. You’re not the only one in your position. Let’s do some more training and then give it another go.”
Schools, however, do not do this. They lump the children who’ve struggled back in with the children who’ve excelled and then feed them directly into next year’s syllabus. They pay no heed to the fact that much of what the children will be expected to learn will be building on what they’ve just shown they do not understand, or the fact that being surrounded by people who manifestly get something you don’t is terrible for one’s self-confidence.
The result of this destructive policy is a large number of despondent children who assume they ‘don’t get maths’ simply because they had a bad year when they were eight, meaning they lack that crucial piece of knowledge which makes what they’re currently studying intelligible.
The’ martial arts approach’ avoids these problems. Instead of progressing children according to their age (which, when you think about it, is kind of bizarre), why not advance them according to their mastery, just as we do in Judo (or musical instruments). Employers would not ask, “how may A’s did you get at GCSE”. They would ask “what level (belt?) are you in Mathematics”. They will learn far more about the child’s ability from doing so than under the current model.
True, there are disadvantages to the martial art’s approach. Children will probably not appreciate being separated from their friends as they move up the belts at different speeds, but they can always meet up with each other at lunch times and after school, and it might actually improve discipline in class. The new approach might also require more regular examinations to avoid children getting stuck at a level they’ve already mastered. But at the same time, the fact that you can simply try again next term will take a lot of the pressure out of the experience.
In education, as in martial arts, mastery of the basics is essential for further development. Our current age-based education system deprives students of these fundamentals with devastating consequences down the line. If we can look beyond what we’ve always done, simply because we’ve always done it, I am confident we’ll have our kids head-kicking quadratic equations in no time.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, please feel free to follow me on Twitter. You might also like some of the other things I’ve written, such as ‘Politicians Are Asking the Wrong Questions’ and ‘Can We Predict the Jobs of the Future?’
The Individualist
26th October 2016
The idea for this article came from Sal Khan’s Ted talk: Let’s teach for mastery — not test scores, which I highly recommend.
